Monday, April 17, 2017

Tatarstan Names an Ethnic Russian as Its Prime Minister

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 17 – Aleksey Pesoshin
has been confirmed by Tatarstan’s State Council as the republic’s fifth prime
minister since 1991. He is the first ethnic Russian among them, but he is a
native of Kazan and, while a mathematician and technocrat, is very much part of
Kazan’s political establishment.

That Pesoshin is an ethnic Russian
may forestall Moscow criticism of President Rustam Minnikhanov as Tatarstan
pursues the renewal of its power-sharing agreement with the Russian government,
but that he is a native of Kazan and part of its establishment likely means
that he will not pursue any radically new policies within that Middle Volga
republic.

Pesoshin, 53 and the scion of
Russians who were evacuated to Tatarstan during World War II, was trained and
worked as a mathematician for much of his adult life. He then went into
business there before shifting to administrative work in the government, working
first in the Kazan city government and since 2014 as first deputy premier.

Reaction is only beginning to come
in, but Alina Grigroyeva of Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir Service has interviewed
several specialists about what Pesoshin’s rise to the prime ministership means
(idelreal.org/a/28434426.html).

Political analyst Sergey Sergeyev
says that Pesoshin is in some ways very different than the man he replaces,
Ildar Khalikov. Pesoshin is a mathematician and production manager while
Khalikov is a lawyer and a financial specialist. Moreover, “Pesoshin is an
ethnic Russian while Khalikov is a Tatar.”

But what the two men have in common,
the analyst continues, is “more significant.” They both are part of permanent
government and “informal ‘party of power.’”And that suggests that Pesoshin in his new role will not make “any
revolutionary changes,” at least not on his own.

Ruslan Aysin, another analysts says,
that the only difference that really matters is that Pesoshin is likely to be
tougher and more demanding and that he will serve as a reliable defense for
Minnikhanov against criticism from Russians that he is too much a Tatar
nationalist. The republic president can point to this appointment as evidence
of the contrary.

From Minnikhanov’s perspective,
Pesoshin has an additional advantage. A technocrat, “the new prime minister should
be equally distant from all political influence groups, devoted to [the
Tatarstan president] and not have any particular political ambitions” beyond
the post he now has.

And Artur Khaziyev, the leader of the
European Tatarstan group, says that Pesoshin’s appointment shows two things: “the
final strengthening of the technical rather than political role of the office
of prime minister” and the fact that the new man is someone “from the republic
and not from the outside or the federal center.”